By Ken Tam
The past year demanded extraordinary flexibility and resilience from educators. Faced with overlapping personal and professional pressures, teachers, principals, and administrators improvised, innovated, and adapted to keep students learning. Despite these heroic efforts, systemic barriers persisted and in many places widened opportunity gaps, particularly for Black and Latino students.
With lessons learned from remote and hybrid instruction, we can now reframe our approach to accelerate learning in 2021 and beyond. The pandemic has made one thing clear: change is constant. Schools must equip educators to lead and teach at the speed of change, using smarter assessment, targeted instruction, and equitable practices.
Any effective learning acceleration strategy for 2021 should enable educators to:
- Diagnose learner needs with surgical precision
- Personalize instruction while maintaining grade-level focus
- Engage all learners through social-emotional support and culturally responsive teaching
Diagnose Learner Needs with Surgical Precision
Accurately identifying unfinished learning is the essential first step in addressing learning loss. Time is a scarce resource, and while data is crucial, excessive testing steals instructional minutes. A well-designed assessment system delivers precise, actionable insights without redundant measures.
Teachers need to know a student’s instructional starting point: not just how they compare to a national norm, but the grade level and specific domains where the student currently performs. Percentile ranks can flag students who need help, yet they often fail to reveal what a student actually knows or which standards were missed during disrupted schooling.
A clear, more useful starting point indicates the grade level at which a student is working. If a third grader is functioning at a second-grade level, teachers can focus on the standards one grade below while planning to accelerate toward grade-level expectations. Domain-level detail — for example, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension in reading, or number operations, algebraic thinking, and geometry in math — lets teachers pinpoint gaps and tailor instruction effectively.
Personalize Instruction While Maintaining Grade-Level Focus
It can be tempting to remediate students by retreating multiple grade levels, but evidence and district guidance suggest a better path: keep the focus on grade-level content while providing just-in-time supports. Leading education organizations have emphasized that prioritizing grade-level learning is the most effective approach to accelerate progress.
The key is balancing where students are now with where they need to be. When educators have precise data on students’ progressions, they can apply targeted scaffolds that allow learners to access grade-level tasks. Scaffolding should be timely, appropriate in scope, and tightly linked to the specific prerequisite skills required for success on the current standard. For instance, fourth-grade work with place value, addition, and subtraction relies on earlier skills: understanding hundreds, tens, and ones; adding and subtracting within 1,000; and place value fluency from prior grades.
When scaffolds are deployed correctly — at the right time, in the right amount, and focused on essential prerequisites — students can access and master grade-level content. Combining accurate, actionable assessment data with platforms or methods for personalized practice increases teachers’ capacity and gives students greater control over their learning.
Engage ALL Learners via Social-Emotional and Culturally Responsive Practices
Frequent and abrupt shifts between learning environments disrupted the safe, predictable classroom communities educators worked to build. Restoring a nurturing and engaging atmosphere is critical for learning. Students need environments where they feel seen, supported, and confident to take academic risks.
Social-emotional learning (SEL) should be woven into re-engagement plans for both students and staff. Integrating SEL supports reduces anxiety, strengthens relationships, and creates the conditions for academic growth.
Re-engagement must also confront longstanding inequities. Educators should draw on students’ lived experiences as strengths and resources for learning. Culturally responsive instruction means selecting texts, examples, and problems that reflect students’ identities and backgrounds so they can see themselves in the curriculum. When students encounter materials that validate their culture and experiences, engagement rises and learning becomes more meaningful.
Teachers can use culturally sustaining practices to connect standards-based instruction with real-world contexts familiar to students. This approach supports deeper comprehension, higher motivation, and stronger transfer of skills.
Conclusion
Delivering acceleration at scale requires three interconnected elements: high-quality, efficient assessments that reveal where students are; precise, personalized instruction grounded in grade-level standards; and learning environments that combine social-emotional care with culturally responsive practices. Putting these pieces together is ambitious and demanding work, but it is both achievable and essential.
The pandemic has also shown how quickly educators can adapt. They moved to remote instruction in days, learned new technologies, and found creative ways to keep students engaged. Given the right tools, strategies, and supports, teachers can lead an educational recovery that accelerates learning equitably for all students.
About the author
Ken Tam is a former teacher and district administrator with more than 20 years of experience in education technology. As Executive Director of Personalized Learning and Assessment at Curriculum Associates, he works with educators to build assessment literacy so they can connect data to instruction. He speaks widely on topics such as assessment practices, personalized learning, and strategies to “assess less, know more” while adapting teaching and learning to meet diverse student needs.
This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub focused on the shift in education toward digital curriculum.